October is Over, an irresistibly charming 24 minute film by Karen Akerman and Miguel Seabra Lopes, begins with a chaos of abstract, leathery textures, flashing by in black and white, superimposed over the faint image of a cowboy. This cuts to a shot of Antonio, the filmmakers’ four year old son, in the act of waking up, emerging from the chaos of images in his sleeping brain. “Films grow old,” he says. So do little boys, apparently. They may grow into adult artists, one day.
The film presents Antonio as a kind of child prodigy, creating his own personal artistic vision on film, completely by himself. He has been directed very precisely in his actions by his parents, so that we see him loading film in a camera, shooting a forest scene, and hand-developing the film in a darkroom he’s set up in the bathroom. He has great dexterity, physical precision and mental focus for a child his age, and is able to follow instructions flawlessly. The parents, meanwhile, are remarkably empathetic with their young star, and have done a great job at entering the mental world of a toddler, and imagining what kind of film he would make.
The boy’s ability to precisely follow directions says something about their parental relationship with him, since we all know that certain children, even at that age, would systematically do the opposite of everything mom and dad told them to do. This boy is happy to cooperate, which shows that he trusts his parents. Furthermore, the fact that mom and dad are filmmakers means that, in a real sense, they are teaching him to be an adult. By following their directions and performing the actions of ‘making a film,’ he may not literally learn how to shoot and edit, but he is having an early experience of the responsibility and adventure of being an artist, like his parents. They artfully blend together the “playing” that kids do, almost always a kind of rehearsal for adulthood, and the “playing” that actors do.
He isn’t depicted as an entirely mature artist however: he presents his first reel of footage to his parents, who help him view it on a moviola, and it turns out that the footage wasn’t exposed properly and didn’t come out. (Only the parents’ hands are seen onscreen, keeping the focus of the story on the world of the child.)
In a fascinating sequence, Antonio contemplates this early artistic failure in a kind of cave that has two seats carved into it, moving restlessly back and forth from one seat to the other. It is as if he is contemplating his film from two points of view, as any artist must do, alternating between the point of view of the creator to that of an audience encountering the film for the first time in a theater. The cave itself seems to suggest the mysterious inner place where artistic ideas are formed.
Antonio acknowledges the collaborative nature of the seventh art, and realizes that he cannot create his film entirely by himself. For his next attempt at filmmaking he sends the footage off to a lab to be processed. He also accepts help from his parents with editing: he does the cutting, and they do the splicing.
In a humorously touching sequence, Antonio, seeking funding for his project, is seen running past a series of walls, shouting “I want to do my film!” He is a typical child having a tantrum. (It’s one of the moments in the film when it is clear how much fun he had acting in his parents’ film.) Yet isn’t it the case that adult artists, coming up against the brick wall of institutional resistance, are in essence making this same cry over and over as they seek funding? (Hopefully in a more reasonable, sophisticated tone.)
For this project, our young artist turns to digital video and found footage: tapes which his parents shot of him as a newborn, which he takes from a drawer in the middle of the night. He calls his film Oktober in a tribute to the Eisenstein film, which his parents have screened for him. His video, however, is an abstract deconstruction of the baby’s cries, cut up into short segments and strung together as a kind of musical composition. (The video seems more inspired by Martin Arnold than by Eisenstein.) To be fair, many artists are tempted to make works in this vein when they first get their hands on nonlinear editing software. Something in the way that computers allow one to infinitely cut up, repeat, and alter tiny fragments of footage seems to make this genre irresistible to beginners.
Antonio probes into his own birth and origins in his video, and Akerman and Seabra Lopes probe into the origins of cinema itself. The limitless freedom and bold inventions of a very young art form are epitomized in Eisenstein’s wildly experimental montage. The chaos of the revolution seems to mix with the chaos of a new art form struggling to define its language.
In 2015, when this film was made, cinema was no longer a newborn, just as the four year old Antonio is already growing into a mature artist. In his video, the baby’s cries subside into peaceful dreaming, and the artist’s frustration is dissolved into a return to the dreaming mind, the chaos from which art is born. By projecting their artistic selves into the mind of their four year old son, Akerman and Seabra Lopes are literally infusing his youthful energy into their art. At the same time, the film embodies the ethos of a maturing art form: that techniques and insights are passed on from one generation to the next. In a touching scene, the parents quietly enter the bedroom of the sleeping boy, whispering the names of their favorite filmmakers to him, hoping to fill his dreaming mind with the inspiration of previous generations.
Cinema is like a child, it seems. In order for the art form to continue to grow, it must be carefully nurtured, guided, and also given the freedom to explore new territory and make mistakes. October is Over invents a wonderful scenario for exploring this process. We can see that Akerman and Seabra Lopes are good parents, and the abilities which allow them to nurture and support Antonio’s growth also help them to make wonderful films.
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